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Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

> The report reveals that a combination of free time, curiosity and natural playfulness has led to young orcas adopting this 'trend' of boat-bumping..

> Most of the 15 were male juveniles and teens..suggesting that what started as playful head-bumping on boat rudders has escalated as the animals have grown larger..And no orca over the age of 25 – when males are fully grown – has been seen participating in the tomfoolery.

> The animals are known to be sensitive to trends.. Perhaps most famously, in 1987, a female orca in the Pacific Ocean near Puget Sound was observed carrying a dead salmon on her head; within two months, killer whales from her pod and two others were also wearing 'fish hats.' But it was all a fad.

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I believe orcas can live as long as humans. So there's a bunch of middle-aged orcas out there who sometimes go:

"Remember when we all wore fish hats after Jeannie got one? Man, that was crazy... Do you think a dead salmon would look good on me still?"

The important thing was that I had a salmon on my head, which was the style at the time. They didn't have any pink salmons, because of the humans. The only thing you could get was those decaying yellow ones...

It's funny - I hung on to my dead trout, which is basically the same thing. These things go in cycles!

We can't bust rudders like we used to. But we have our ways.

Idle fins are the devil's workshop!

Do the go after the sail boats or is it just motorboats.

The propellers are quite loud under the water, I wonder if they are maybe annoyed by the noise and learnt attacking those vessels makes the noise go away

Why wouldn’t the older ones do that, and only the males?

I recently learned that blue light is 50% stronger in interfering with melatonin generation in toddlers versus adults. I’m a lot more sensitive to noise than my father is and my daughter is even more sensitive, she’ll start screaming when people are too loud.

Not saying that is the reason, but your question is addressing something quite common in different scenarios.

Genuinely I read it as a little cross-species 'boys will be boys' at work.

The answer is apparent if in the nature-vs-nurture girls-vs-boys discussion you keep a healthy inclination towards nature.

Would have been my immediate assumption as well. Wonder if they asked that question at all

Being a sailor, I've been carefully paying attention to the Orca reports, they seem to like the modern sail boat fin rudders which have no skeg (vertical support attached to hull with hinged rudder behind) and is pretty easy to knock off the boat with little damage to the Orca. I heard about a boat with a skeg-hung rudder that stopped dead in the water in that area, but was able to continue on with a working rudder. When hauled out later, the hinge mount of the rudder had been twisted quite a bit off the skeg, so that Orca got a headache, and decided to move on.

I wonder if any boats with a traditional long keel have been affected? I'd expect that arrangement to be even less attractive to an orca given there's no gap between the rudder and keel.

I haven't heard of any Orca success with either skeg-hung or long keel boats. A big "new" development in sailboat design is dropping the skeg on rudders for better sailing performance and lower cost even on blue-water sail boats. And also going with twin fin rudders, so more targets on a single boat for Orca's to play with. So faster and cheaper but far less safe.

Among the sailing cruisers, it's become clear this is not a factor. Sailing vessels have been attacked with their propellors on brake, with their props disengaged or with props running.

In general, marine mammals don't mind the sound of engines (even though I do!) We have had pods of dolphins swimming along and playing around our boat in all configurations. I once turned off the engine when the dolphins came around, and they left immediately, presumable because we lost too much speed to be interesting? That genuinely surprised me, as I like sailing for the quiet.

Dolphins like to wake surf, so yeah, they left to go find another boat.

That’s quite funny. We think of nature as a separate space, away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, where solitude and quiet can be enjoyed.

To the dolphins, I guess your boat was probably like their equivalent of an amusement park or something, haha. Novel, exciting, loud, and artificial.

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